East Africa Is One Market — So Why Are We Still Researching It as Five?

By ADRI Research Institute

The East African Community represents a market of over 300 million people, a combined GDP exceeding $300 billion, and a stated commitment to deep economic integration that has been in development for more than two decades.

Yet when most development organisations commission trade research in the region, they commission country studies. One for Uganda. One for Kenya. One for Tanzania. Separate terms of reference, separate field teams, separate reports that sit in separate filing systems and are never read together.

This is a research design problem. And it has real consequences for policy.

The Integration Gap

Regional integration is not merely a political project — it is an economic infrastructure question. When the Northern Corridor moves goods from Mombasa to Kampala to Kigali, the bottlenecks are not national. They are regional. A clearance delay at one border affects traders in three countries. A policy change in one market ripples through value chains that cross four.

Understanding these dynamics requires research that is designed at the regional level — not assembled from national fragments after the fact.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has raised the stakes considerably. Uganda and its neighbours are now operating within a continental trade architecture that demands a new quality of regional economic intelligence. Most existing research infrastructure is not built for this.

What Regional Trade Research Gets Wrong

It underestimates informal cross-border trade. Formal trade statistics capture what moves through official border posts with proper documentation. They miss the significant volume of goods — particularly food commodities, livestock, and consumer products — that move through informal channels. In some corridors, informal trade represents the majority of actual trade flows. Policy built on formal trade data alone is policy built on a partial picture.

It ignores the trader behind the transaction. Trade statistics count goods. They rarely count the people moving them — and even more rarely examine who those people are, what constraints they face, and what support they need. Women dominate informal cross-border trade in many East African corridors. Their experiences of border procedures, harassment, and financing barriers are systematically underdocumented.

It treats policy as the only lever. Trade facilitation is not just a policy question. It is an infrastructure question, a finance question, a standards and certification question, and a market information question. Research that isolates one dimension produces recommendations that fail to account for the others.

The Research East Africa Actually Needs

Regional integration research that is fit for purpose needs to:

Map value chains end-to-end across borders, not from farm gate to national border. The competitiveness of Uganda's coffee, maize, or sesame in regional and global markets depends on the full chain — including what happens on the other side of the border.

Quantify informal trade flows systematically, using methodologies that capture what official statistics miss. This is technically demanding but entirely achievable with the right field design.

Embed gender and inclusion analysis into trade research as standard — not because it is a donor requirement, but because trade policy that ignores who is actually trading will consistently produce interventions that reach the wrong people.

Connect research to the institutions that can act on it — the EAC Secretariat, national trade ministries, the private sector, and regional business associations all have different information needs. Research dissemination that does not distinguish between these audiences leaves most of its potential impact on the table.

The Opportunity

East Africa's economic integration story is not finished — it is still being written. The policy decisions being made in the next decade will shape regional trade architecture for a generation.

Those decisions will be better if they are grounded in evidence that is as regional in scope as the challenges it seeks to address.

The research community in East Africa needs to match the ambition of the integration agenda. That means designing studies that cross borders, building analytical frameworks that reflect regional realities, and producing findings that inform regional — not just national — decision-making.

The market is one. It is time the research caught up.